Landscapes of the Song of Songs

Poetry and Place

Elaine T. James

Develops the conept of the "landscape" in the Song of Songs, separate from emerging scholarship on "space" and "ecology"

Offers new readings of the poetry in the Song of Songs through ecocritical and feminist lenses

Provides a rich and nuanced interdisciplinary study of Hebrew poetry

Landscapes of the Song of Songs

Poetry and Place

Elaine T. James

Description

In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.

Landscapes of the Song of Songs

Poetry and Place

Elaine T. James

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Landscape and Lyric2. The Agrarian Landscape3. The Garden4. The Cityscape5. The Map of the Body6. Conclusion

Landscapes of the Song of Songs

Poetry and Place

Elaine T. James

Author Information

Elaine T. James is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University.

Landscapes of the Song of Songs

Poetry and Place

Elaine T. James

Reviews and Awards

"In a heady mix of hard-nosed literary criticism and enlivening theory, Elaine James elaborates a series of care-full and close readings of selected poems from the Song of Songs thematized around the natural and cultivated landscapes that form the base of this poetry's imaginary. The result is an achingly beautiful and evocative exploration of the Song that is at once highly original and uncommonly sensible. And the writing is exquisite. Rarely has biblical scholarship been so rapturously rendered. A smart and delightful read." -- F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, author of On Biblical Poetry

"Elaine James has written a lovely book, sensitive, detailed, thoroughly immersed in the literature of the Song of Songs and theoretically sophisticated. She shows, through careful and intricate studies of the motifs of vineyard, pastorale, garden and city, how landscape and the body, nature and culture, mutually imbricate each other, and concludes with a splendid, synaesthetic study of the descriptive portraits of the woman. Her writing is as beautiful and passionate as her subject matter." -- Francis Landy, Professor Emeritus, the University of Alberta

"Study of the Song of Songs gets a shot in the arm with this sensational new book by Elaine James. Good close readers of biblical poetry are few and far between, and we can count James among the best. And by combining close, literary attention with an in-depth engagement with landscape studies and ecological criticism James opens up the poetry in new and exciting ways." -Tod Linafelt, author of The Hebrew Bible as Literature: A Very Short Introduction

"Elaine T. James brings a novel approach to the poetics of the Song of Songs (hereafter, the Song) by focusing on the text's evocation of various types of landscapes ... This book's unique contribution is to show that the Song elaborates a vision of what it might mean to love one's land, which is to see it with affection and to intervene in it with care (151). James is at her best when she is explicating the poetry of the Song by analogy with other artistic expressions, ancient and modern." -- Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society